Donald Trump tries nominating Christopher Wray, from his own Russia-tinged law firm, as FBI Director

| 1:53 pm EDT June 7, 2017
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Donald Trump tried and failed to find any political allies who were willing to become his nominee for FBI Director, having gone through everyone from Trey Gowdy to John Cornyn to Joe Lieberman. So now Trump is giving up all pretenses by nominating someone who is tied to not only his own business empire, but also to the Russian government.

Say hello to Christopher Wray, whom Donald Trump announced as his nominee this morning to replace James Comey as the Director of the FBI. Wray is currently an attorney at the law firm of King and Spalding, which is a wee bit of a problem. For one thing, the Trump Organization is a client of King and Spalding (source). So Trump is nominating someone from his own law firm to be the FBI Director, who would then be in charge of investigating Trump’s Russia scandal. But it gets worse.

King and Spalding is also representing Russian government-controlled oil company Rosneft (source). And Rosneft isn’t just any Russian oil company; it’s the one that’s been implicated by name in former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s Trump-Russia dossier. So Trump is essentially trying to put Rosneft’s law firm in charge of leading the FBI investigation into whether or not the claims about Rosneft in the dossier are true.

To be clear, King and Spalding is a large law firm, and there’s currently nothing to suggest that Christopher Wray has personally done legal work for either the Trump Organization or Rosneft. But by nominating someone to run the FBI who works for a law firm that represents himself and the Russian government, Donald Trump is purposely thumbing his nose at the sanctity of the Trump-Russia investigation. If the Senate does its job, Wray will be rejected based on these conflicts of interest alone, regardless of any other factors.